| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
24 Jan 2005 03:14:57 AM |
| Object: |
SpongeBush |
From The New York Times, 1/23/05:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/opinion/23dowd.html?hp
A Bunch of Krabby Patties
By MAUREEN DOWD
I should have known.
I can't believe I thought he was just an innocent little sponge
wearing tight shorts.
What in the name of Davy Jones's locker would a sponge be doing
holding hands with a starfish or donning purple and hot-pink flowered
garb to redecorate the Krusty Krab if he weren't a perverted
invertebrate?
Before this is over, we're going to find out that SpongeBob is the
illicit spawn of the Tampa shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge.
Who knew SpongeBob would become as fraught as the cover of "Abbey
Road"?
It took Dr. James Dobson, the conservative Christian leader and gay
marriage opponent, who claims the president's re-election was more a
mandate for his ideas than George Bush's, to point out the insidious
underside of the popular cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants.
It takes a sponge to brainwash a child.
Holy Abe!
Dr. Dobson outed SpongeBob at a black-tie inaugural fete last week for
members of Congress and political allies.
He said that a "pro-homosexual video" - starring SpongeBob, Barney,
Jimmy Neutron, Winnie the Pooh, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy - was
set to go to elementary schools to promote a "tolerance pledge,"
including tolerance for differences of "sexual identity."
Hoppin' clams, as they say in Bikini Bottom, the den of epicene
iniquity where SpongeBob lives.
Nothing good can come of tolerance.
Dan Martinsen, a spokesman for Nickelodeon, where SpongeBob beats the
pants off the competition, was flummoxed:
"It's a sponge, for crying out loud. He has no sexuality."
Dr. Dobson has done the country a service by reminding us to watch out
for the dark side of lovable but malleable sponges.
He inspired me to fish through the president's Inaugural Address with
a more skeptical eye.
Mr. Bush's epic pledge to support democratic movements and
institutions in every nation and to end "tyranny in our world" may
seem wildly pie-in-the-sky, given that the Iraq vortex has drained our
military.
Although his incendiary speech about "the untamed fire of freedom" has
been widely interpreted as a code-red warning to both foes and
friends, I wonder if the president knew he was literally promising to
stamp out undemocratic governments across the globe, which would
include some of our top allies.
He probably thought it was a fancier way of repackaging the Iraq
invasion, not as a failed search for W.M.D., but as a blow for freedom
(a word used 27 times) and liberty (used 15 times).
I wonder if W. is surprised that people took it literally.
The Bushes don't always understand that they're being held to their
rhetoric in major speeches.
(Read my warships.)
For such a brass-knuckled vision, the president's delivery was
curiously unemotional.
Some of the same advisers who filled Mr. Bush's brain with sugary
visions of a quick and painless Iraq makeover did mean the speech to
be literal; they are drawing up military options for the rest of the
Middle East.
Once again, the lovable and malleable president seems to be soaking up
the martial mind-set of those around him, almost like ... a sponge.
SpongeBush SquarePants!
We can only hope that Dr. Dobson doesn't pick up on the resemblance.
SpongeBob, as his song goes, "lives in a pineapple under the
sea/absorbent and yellow and porous is he!"
SpongeBush lives in a bubble in D.C./absorbent and shallow and porous
is he!
SpongeBush ensnared the country in a whale of a mess in Iraq because
he guilelessly absorbed the neocons' dire warnings about Saddam's
weapons capabilities and their rosy assumptions about Ahmad Chalabi's
leadership capabilities.
***** Cheney is a gruff Mr. Krabs taskmaster to SpongeBush, but
SpongeBush is crazy about him anyhow.
W. trustingly let his vice president make the worst-case scenario
about Iraq a first-case scenario.
Mr. Bush might have thought he was just blowing pretty bubbles full of
lofty ideals about freedom and liberty in his speech, but Mr. Cheney
and the neocons seem intent on filleting Iran and Syria.
(Doesn't Richard Perle remind you of the snarky and pretentious
next-door neighbor to SpongeBob, Squidward Tentacles?)
The vice president told Don Imus that Iran was "right at the top of
the list" of trouble spots, and that Israel "might well decide to act
first" with a military strike.
Even if he's a little light in the flippers, SpongeBob has brought
children good, clean fun.
SpongeBush has brought the world dark, endless fights.
---
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